Story of the coin: Ethereum Classic

Today we are going to tell you the story of a currency with extremely strong principles – Ethereum Classic. Born from the fire of community disputes around the entire destiny of the Ethereum network after the DAO hack, today Ethereum Classic is a really unique coin due to its active principles and belief that “code is a law.”

How Ethereum Classic appeared?

Back in July 2016, one of the most massive hacking attacks happened in the Ethereum network. It started from DAO – Decentralized Autonomous Organization – the complex smart contract which was going to make a revolution in the entire network. More details about DAO and its hack can be found in our previous article on Ethereum.

To neutralize the aftermath of this hack, the Ethereum community voted for the hard fork of the network, which causes significant changes in the code and recoil of all DAO-related transactions to refund those who legitimately invested in it. This discussion has led to a colossal discord in the entire community: the major part of it voted for a hard fork and changing the original code to get the stolen money back. However, there also was a part who stayed strong on the underlying philosophy of Ethereum, which states that any transaction is unchangeable and irreversible. But as it was planned, July 20th, 2016, on the 1,920,000 block, the Ethereum hard fork happened. More than 80% of the nodes updated to the new client and the hard fork code was successfully implemented.

The old, non-forked network was predicted to disappear within several hours after the 1,920,000th block arrived, but surprisingly, instead the block 1,920,001 appeared . This is how Ethereum Classic was born.

Later, the Declaration of Independence was uploaded to the website of Ethereum Classic, based on their GitHub page. According to this document, original Ethereum was abused by its founders and Ethereum Foundation and that’s why community divided and made a decision to run Ethereum Classic, network liberated from all those grievances of “original” Ethereum.

Core principles of the new cryptocurrency are:

Saving the original blockchain in its primary way.

Believing in perspectives of the Ethereum Classic as an uncensored blockchain for all users.

“Code is law” principle, which means that no one can change the code for any reasons, especially to make things more comfortable for someone

In their functions, Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) are equal. The difference is mainly in philosophy and ideology questions. The Ethereum network showed previously that they could step back from their own rules and change the code at their will.

Callisto (CLO) is Ethereum Classic hard fork?

Сontrary to common belief, Callisto (CLO) was not a hard fork of Ethereum Classic, but a network developed by one of the ETC teams as a side-project. It’s based on some technologies of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Features from Callisto could be implemented into ETC network. Even though all ETC holders got CLO airdrop, these are two different projects and it’s incorrect to say that Callisto is an Ethereum Classic hard fork.

Ethereum Classic Network

Nowadays, Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a good option for crypto novices to start their mining experience. Stats of the network are still low enough that even without strong hardware, but just by joining the mining pool, everyone could start mining and get some reward. New blocks appear every 24 seconds. As far as ETC is based on Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, there was a difficulty bomb, which was supposed to make Ether Classic unprofitable for mining in late 2018, but after hard-fork happened on May 30, 2018, this bomb was removed.

Ethereum Classic is fully supported by major exchanges, so there is no problem to withdraw mined ETCs either in other crypto, or in fiat money. Average ETC/USD exchange rate by June 25, 2018 is $15.74.